


A Man of Your Talents

by doublejoint



Category: Star Wars - All Media Types, Star Wars Sequel Trilogy
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, M/M, Post-Canon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-12-31
Updated: 2019-12-31
Packaged: 2021-02-27 09:13:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 8,721
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/22044658
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/doublejoint/pseuds/doublejoint
Summary: Destiny is cheap.
Relationships: Armitage Hux/Kylo Ren
Comments: 14
Kudos: 120





	A Man of Your Talents

**Author's Note:**

> TROS SPOILERS!!
> 
> Character death/resurrection, references to traumatic moments, resurrected character thinking about when they were dead, copious amounts of internal monologue

When Kylo Ren wakes up on Exogol, he is naked and alone, staring into the stars. The roof is open; the chamber is in ruins, as it had been the last time he’d seen it, the last time he’d been alive. He was dead; he is quite sure of that, just as he is sure he is alive right now. This is no trick of the Force, no antechamber of the afterlife, no trial aside from the way that being alive is a trial. He has to breathe; there is air in his lungs, mixed with whatever ancient dust particles float in it. The floor is digging into his skin (he has so much skin, and it is so easily dented and impressed on). Ren sits up, and the vertigo hits him; he gasps and closes his eyes, biting the inside of his lip hard enough to nearly draw blood. He doesn’t remember his own teeth being this sharp.

He had not wished for this. Or, whatever of his essence existed in the Force after death had not. He had died, earlier than he would have wanted, but he had destroyed the Knights of Ren, saved Rey, done what he had to to complete his journey.

Ren opens his eyes and gets to his feet. His soles are too soft for the ground; he frowns. It’s as if he’s been newly born again, which he supposes he has, straight from the Force, right where he left off but with baby feet and soft skin, the old scars still there but faint, all the wounds from the last battle healed as if he’d spent the time since then in a bacta tank. There’s plenty of bacta here, he’s pretty sure, but he is alone; no one could have preserved his body (and there was no body to preserve, if his rotten boots and the remains of what looks like his shirt lying a meter or so away are any indication). 

He is alone.

There is no one here with him, and no one within reach of the Force. There is no bridge in his mind to Rey, for the first time since--Starkiller, really. Even then, he hadn’t been alone; Snoke had always been in his head in one way or another, probing at his mind, whispering, stoking the darkness in him, the darkness that is still here, just below the surface of his skin. Renouncing the darkness hadn’t drained it from him, just as renouncing the light hadn’t severed his connection to that. Now that he is free of the moment, free of Rey and Palpatine and immediate threats to her and to himself, it is difficult to draw on the light. That was the last thing he’d done, but he doesn’t remember how; he reaches inside and around him and everything is neutral or dark. Ren had pursued the purging of the light from himself and his nature for his entire life, but--there, there it is, the light in a corner of himself. He can feel it, but he can’t pull it out from himself, buried to the hilt and refusing to budge.

The Force is in balance, though; this much Ren can feel. It has never been this solidly light, this steady, in Ren’s lifetime. The darkness has always been lurking beneath whatever light floats to the surface, a strong undercurrent, but it’s missing now. The First Order, the Final Order, the Dark Side--they’re all truly gone.

So why is he here? Must he siphon out the darkness within him before he is truly allowed to truly be one with the Force forever? Is there something he has to do, some place he has to go? Is he meant to stay here and meditate, atone for his past within the constraints of an organic body?

He shivers. He needs clothes, and food, and probably a weapon. There should be something here--Palpatine had lived here after all. He can make a spare set of clothes work, and he’s lived on worse than whatever cans and rations have survived however long he’s been gone.

It’s been a few years, he thinks, judging from the state of decay of the facility, confirmed when he steps outside, clad in some stiff spare clothes. The wreckage of the fleet and the battle still floats on the water, TIE parts and half-sunk destroyer cannons, and what looks like a few close-to-whole X-Wings. If he wants to get out of here, he can probably patch a few of them together into something serviceable, and salvage some fuel from another vessel if needed. 

It’s not a question of if, though; it’s a question of when he runs out of the meal rations he’d found in a back cabinet. It’s more a question of where he’s going.

Where can he go? His parents are dead. Rey is still out there, but the rest of the Resistance (or the New New Republic, if they’ve moved onto that) might not welcome him with open arms, and if there’s anything left of the First Order they won’t either. He’s already been killed only to die again; Ren very much doubts that this is for the same reason. 

If Skywalker were here, he would tell Ren to be patient, to reach out and feel, to not be discouraged if he doesn’t have an answer. He needs an answer, though. Sitting here, spinning his wheels on a Sith planet, will do no good, no matter how long he meditates.

* * *

Cobbling together a ship from two of the X-Wings helps clear his mind. It does not tell him anything he needs, but it’s refreshing to do something with his hands. Calligraphy would be better, but joining wires and ripping machines apart with the Force before he puts them back together with improvised tools is a decent substitute. 

The closer the ship is to completion, the more Ren’s decision solidifies. There is nothing for him here. There is only residual darkness, easy to resist despite his inability to tap into the light. He is not here to destroy what’s left of the facility and take it with him, nor is he here to recreate a body for Palpatine yet again.

He wishes, though, that he could see a spirit--not Palpatine’s, but one of the Jedi who had come before him, or his parents, or even Skywalker. A memory, again, something to assure him he’s doing the right thing, would be helpful. But he’s been thrown in the deep end with a ladder he’s had to build by himself, and no destination in mind.

He thinks of Skywalker’s voice, telling him to reach out and breathe, to look for what he needs. He opens the ship and climbs inside, hitting the levers. It starts. The navigation system is a tiny screen in the left corner; Ren closes his eyes and ghosts his fingers over it. He reaches out in the Force, thinking of guidance, of help, of where he needs to be, and then it’s there in his fingers as they fly across the screen, tapping in sequence some coordinates that Ren can’t begin to figure out before he’s onto the next. 

The ship rises into the air before he takes a look: Lah’mu, in the outer rim.

* * *

Ren knows next to nothing about Lah’mu, nor the mostly-empty spaceport he lands in. The name sounds familiar, a footnote in some Rebellion story or other probably, but from where he stands it appears to be nothing special, quiet and out of the way. He feels nothing special in the Force, nothing he can say, but it feels like he’s headed in the right direction. Ren frowns, then closes his eyes (harder to get away with it without a mask). 

Are his instincts right? Does he even know them anymore? He’s so used to ignoring them when they pull him toward the light, so used to pushing them away, so used to shoving them aside in the wake of his plans, that he can’t help but second guess himself. He’s so used to pointing himself toward the dark that he could be walking into a trap.

He’ll be prepared, whatever it is.

It’s easy enough to sell the modified X-Wing for some credits, a decent chunk spread across a few chips, and a fair price from what Ren can tell. It’ll be enough to stay at the local inn and hopefully find what he’s looking for. (Hopeful is enough; Hopeful is an encouraging sign; that’s what Skywalker had said so long ago when Ren was so much younger, so much more light than he is now. As easy as it is to be tempted by the light and to follow it, he doesn’t feel good or strong or warm right now, the way he’d always thought he was supposed to and was never very good at. And yet, he can think of Skywalker without the resentment bubbling up to the surface like a shaken can of a carbonated drink.

The beer in the local inn is good (how long, not counting the time he was dead, since he’d sat down at a bar like an ordinary person?) and no one appears to recognize him. The overall feeling in the room is weariness, people who work with their hands all day, stiff backs and standing up, manufacturers and mechanics and farmers. Ren tries to focus beyond the spinning of their minds, the people in rooms above him, the activity of the spaceport. There’s the farmland, fertile and rich, just past the first harvest, rusty machines and grain nearly ready to burst from its stalks in the fields that are still not quite mature. There are droids hauling crops and equipment, farmers at home in their houses, fallow fields that will be ready again the next season. This place is peaceful, like the land they’d worked back when he was training with Skywalker. Not much must be transported off-planet, Ren would guess; the grain supports livestock and food products here, and livestock and other crops support the rest of the food chain. 

Someone at the other end of the bar is studying him. Ren’s hand moves toward the blaster at his hip; he focuses his mind on their Force presence. Oh. They’re checking him out; they haven’t recognized the former Supreme Leader of the First Order. Ren catches his own reflection in the glass cabinet behind the bar; the panes of glass cut the image of his face but it looks mostly the same. The scar from Starkiller has faded, or is perhaps gone entirely. It’s hard to tell.

It doesn’t matter.

Ren stays until most of the other patrons have left. He’s not eager to fall asleep on a lumpy landside mattress again, though staying here has gotten him no closer to finding what his goal is. The Twi’lek bartender refills his glass a fourth time.

“Haven’t seen you around these parts,” he says. “What are you here for?”

He’s irritating and invasive; the urge to snap his neck or mind-trick him passes through Ren’s mind and fingers quickly and dies.

“I don’t know yet,” Ren says. 

The bartender eyes him, sizing him up. Ren can feel his thoughts without trying too hard--a bounty hunter, a spy, waiting for a contact or a target. There’s no harm in letting the bartender think that if he wants to.

“You’ll find out soon enough,” says the bartender. “Humans are good at finding a purpose even where there isn’t any.”

Ren chugs the rest of his beer and leaves a stack of credits on the bar.

* * *

He dreams of a distant island, the sound of the ocean and the distant calling of birds, and of Skywalker. It’s not really him visiting Ren’s dream, just a memory with the gaps filled in, probably not what he looked like or sounded like when he’d died (there were bits and pieces, he thinks, that he’d seen in Rey’s mind, but nothing concrete). Skywalker’s probably too important to visit him anyway, not when he can’t properly stay on the Light Side. It had seemed so tempting and close all those years he’d tried to fight it off, but now that he wants to embrace it, it eludes him.

“Be patient,” not-real-Skywalker says.

Ren scowls. This advice isn’t helpful. This is worse than the bartender; at least that so-called advice wasn’t coming from his own head. Being patient is all well and good when you know there’s a payoff coming or can see what a payoff could be. 

“Trust the Force,” Ren says, before Skywalker can.

Skywalker smiles, not the crooked way he had on Crait (though that hadn’t really been him either), like he had when Ren was starting to understand some lesson or koan. 

“Trust yourself, Ben. Trust your instincts.”

He’s gone before Ren can form a retort about the name. He thinks of his Han Solo’s--his father’s--voice, saying that Kylo Ren is dead. That feels wrong now, least of all because he’s not dead, hadn’t just been killed and healed, isn’t walking to a near-certain death. The light is still difficult to reach, as if he’d been subconsciously holding a preset comm channel for it in his previous life and in his death it had been scrambled, and now he can’t remember which way to tune.

“Why here?” Ren asks aloud, but there is no answer even from himself.

* * *

Whatever’s here, it’s certainly not a Force mystery. It’s connected to the Force (as is everything) but it’s got as little to do with the Dark Side and the Light Side, the Jedi and the Sith, as anything can. It’s not connected to Rey, or kyber crystals, or the Knights of Ren. It’s familiar, but just different enough that Ren can’t recognize it right away. It’s hiding behind a corner, its shadow distorted by the angle of the light. 

Ren walks several kilometers down a dirt road and back, no closer to any farms or any sort of activity or clue. He could rent or buy a speeder, or purchase passage, but he doesn’t want to waste the money when he doesn’t know where he’s going. The bar at the inn, similarly, is something he avoids, but he ends up there on a handful of occasions anyway. He’s not here for gossip, but it’s more likely to hold something to go on than sitting in his room, meditating, and finding nothing the way he does most days.

One regular has taken Ren’s usual seat, so he settles himself three stools away and taps his fingers silently on the underside of the bar. Two farmers are talking in a hushed conversation at one of the tables; a mechanic sits at the other end of the bar nursing some sort of liquor concoction.

“Fresh malt beverage,” says the bartender. “Straight from the Ruo Farm.”

“I didn’t know someone was running that place again,” says the regular. “Is it as good as it used to be?”

“Nah,” says the bartender. “But it’s still got that clean finish. Must be something in the soil.”

“You know the new folks?”

“Only one I know of,” says the bartender. “You were offworld, a few seasons ago. Human, came in what looked like a stolen TIE around when the war ended.”

Ren can see the ship now at the surface of the bartender’s mind, rain beating down on the wings, stationed in the port. One of the newer models, in good condition for stolen--or perhaps it had belonged to a deserter, stationed outside of Exegol, who’d flown away when they’d heard of the First Order’s defeat, to live anonymously and farm grains for soft drinks.

“They stole a TIE fighter so they could come here and farm?”

“What would you do if you were a prisoner? Or maybe he was a deserter. Had a limp and a nasty chest wound; I thought he’d come here to die free or something. But he sold the ship for parts and made a pretty penny, enough for some bacta and the old farm. Maybe he was a conscripted farmer or something.”

“Doesn’t sound very Imperial.”

The bartender laughs. Ren is about to clear his throat and ask to order, when the bartender turns and then Ren can see the man clearly in the bartender’s mind. Red hair, a sneering scowl even as he’d limped, haggling for credits through gritted teeth--Hux. 

And this might not be why the Force sent him here, but it’s more to go on than he’s had since he’d woken up. If it’s not his objective, it’s a damn better distraction than walking in the mud and letting his money supply dwindle. The bartender finally seems to notice Ren.

“I’ll have some of that malt beverage,” Ren says. “Where’s that farm it came from?”

“Ruo? Not too far off. You can get there in half a day by speeder.”

Ren nods. The bartender pops the cap on his bottle. Ren’s not usually one for malt beverage, but the bartender’s right; it does finish clean.

* * *

Ren buys an old landspeeder at the spaceport. He could hire a droid to take him there, but he’d rather go alone given what could happen. The odds that Hux will shoot him on sight are higher than they’ve ever been; Ren doesn’t have the protection of the First Order or Snoke or a weapon he can wield better than Hux will ever handle a blaster. Hux hates him. Ren can still stop a bullet with the Force; his reflexes are still quick. Hux will be aware of that, but he might try to shoot anyway--he’ll probably assume Ren is there to kill him. 

Is he?

The Force (the Light Side, anyway) would never send him to murder in cold blood, not someone like Hux, who despite his bloodthirsty malevolance is easily subdued by other methods and has apparently been hiding out on a farm growing crops since running away wounded. 

How would he get away from Exegol in a TIE, though? Would he not have been on the command ship? Unless--he was the spy, and got caught and ran. He’s the obvious suspect, but Ren had not been able to pin it on him perfectly. Pryde or Griss would be more eager to off him on less-than-perfect evidence (Hux himself has killed for less), or they could have caught him when Ren was occupied. 

Ren isn’t interested in executing traitors to a cause that was stomped into the ground after he’d renounced it himself, all in another lifetime. That’s not the Light Side speaking; it’s just practicality. So why is he going? Hux isn’t going to tell him much if anything, if they even go beyond firing weapons at each other.

Perhaps there’s some clue on his farm; he could be hiding something or someone. The Force tells Ren nothing, like a self-satisfied teacher telling him he ought to be able to figure it out for himself. Ren feels like tearing the wheel on the speeder apart, but decides against it. He can’t let anger master him, won’t let out the Dark Side on something as insignificant as this, and steering with the Force isn’t worth the effort. 

The farmland around him is unremarkable, and it doesn’t seem to change much from property to property. He almost misses the turnoff to Hux’s farm, as bland and uniform as the rest of it is, the last of the grain framing the way in. Hux is perhaps cleverer than Ren had given him credit for; no one would expect him to hide out here, doing this. The farm Ren would picture Hux with, if given nothing to draw on, would be exceptionally efficient and ostentatious with a next-generation electric fence; people would prefer the malt he made to the previous owner. And farming is already the last thing Ren would picture him doing; he could see Hux hiding out and trying to build another Starkiller, or as a small-time arms dealer building a weapons empire from the ground up, slowly. 

For a second, Ren wonders if he’d just been so eager to see anything remotely relevant that he’d superimposed Hux’s face over the real person the bartender had seen, taken a passing resemblance and ran with it. If it’s not him, he can just apologize, deflect the shot from his blaster if he’s a First Order loyalist. Ren shuts down the speeder, dismounts, and knocks at the door. There is no droid to peek out and check on him, but knowing Hux there is one somewhere. Ren can feel his presence on the other side of the door; it’s definitely him but he feels different now, no longer a tightly-coiled black hole of deception and hatred. He is looser, more disorganized, still so angry and hateful, but a little desperate in a way Ren hasn’t felt from him.

“Give me a reason why I shouldn’t shoot you.”

He sounds like he wants a reason. Like he’d prefer that to shooting.

“If I wanted you dead I would kill you through the door,” says Ren (he could; he’d thought about it so often before, but now his fingers lack the itch). 

Hux considers that. Ren waits. Then, the door opens and Ren sees him.

His blaster is still pointed straight at Ren; his face is openly wary (though, Ren supposes, he can afford to be when it’s just them). He looks much the same as when Ren saw him last, eyes narrowed and face unscarred and clean-shaven. His hair is shorter, though free of pomade for once, and his clothes are tightly-pressed, just as if he were still wearing a military uniform. Ren could make a crack at him living in the past, but he’d rather not tempt Hux’s trigger finger, especially if the most he’s shot at since the war is a wild animal or two. 

“You were the spy,” says Ren.

Hux’s lip curls into a snarl. “Did Pryde tell you?”

“No. I thought you’d died on board with him.”

“Here to finish what he didn’t?” says Hux, finger millimeters from the trigger..

“I told you. I’d have killed you already.”

“Ren,” says Hux.

“Don’t call me that,” Ren says.

“Solo, then,” says Hux, raising an eyebrow when Ren doesn’t correct him. “Why are you here?”

“I don’t know yet,” says Ren (he’s getting tired of other people asking him this question when he’s still asking it himself and getting no answer or even much of a hint).

“Well, the least you can do is make yourself useful,” says Hux, reaching into his pocket and holding out a pair of heavy gloves.

It’s a dismissal; he’s expecting Ren to turn up his nose at farming, at farming for Hux’s profits, but, well, Ren can’t think of anything better to do and he’s always taken the easy way to annoy Hux. He takes the gloves.

“Where do I start?”

Ren doesn’t need the force to see that Hux already regrets offering.

* * *

Hux wants to kill him but he’s still wary, unsure of what Ren can or will do with the Force, what weapons he might have besides the old blaster strapped to his waist. At least he finally lowers his weapon when they’re out with the crops, though his hand is never far and he’s never far from the cover of tall crops or heavy machinery.

It’s uncanny how Hux runs this farm like a military operation of one. He jots everything down in a manual log book; he inspects the machinery himself; the grains are in rows like soldiers at attention. It’s easier to get plants to listen to you than humans, no matter how docile and brainwashed the humans are, Ren supposes. It’s a pale imitation, though; he has little power here, just a small nonessential cog in the farming machine of the planet. 

(Though, had he been essential to the First Order? He’d thought he was; Snoke had made it seem as if he was, but--if it was all Palpatine--had he truly been essential? Ren hadn’t been able to get rid of him, but he hadn’t tried very hard.)

“Can you fix a droid?” Hux says.

“Yeah,” says Ren.

It’s been a long time, but he’s always been decent with machines.

“Have at it,” says Hux, gesturing toward a rusty humanoid figure leaning against what looks like an irrigation machine. “And stay where I can see you.”

Ren snorts under his breath. Hux, as usual, does not care that Ren doesn’t really trust him. It’s a strange familiarity Ren’s not sure how to feel about.

Hux has a limp, less pronounced than in the bartender’s memory, but memories are faulty. Or, perhaps, it was worse then, a fresh wound. Pryde, maybe, or a trooper--they wouldn’t go for the leg, unless it was to stop him running so they could stare into his eyes while they killed. That’s a feeling Ren knows all too well, and it sends a shiver of dark energy up his hand.

The droid’s wiring is disintegrating, but it’s tangled up and there’s enough to unwind and reconnect tightly. If he gets it working again, it had better not need reprogramming. He’s got no idea what these farm droids are supposed to do. (Does it read the meters so that Hux can record them? Does it plow the fields?) 

Ren could untangle this with his eyes closed, but he watches Hux. Hux isn’t looking directly at him, but his attention’s divided. He’s probably faster than this when he’s not so afraid--Ren can feel him berate himself from here for his inefficiency. Hux hadn’t been like this before, had he? He’d expected a lot of himself, but he hadn’t been so openly harsh, even in the Force. It’s as if there are cracks in his Force presence that he doesn’t care to fix, but not caring is the least Hux-like of all, except perhaps for betraying his own ideals.

He has never liked Ren, nor had he ever had anything but disdain or contempt for any of the other officers (perhaps he’d had crumbs of respect for Peavy and Phasma, and he’d intensely loathed Pryde and the rest of the old guard). But no one had had the zeal for the cause and ideals of the First Order. He lived for terror and fear and control, and he’d always been a threat to anyone ranked above him, if a minor one almost all of the time.

Or maybe that had been all for show. Ren had never made it a point to get to know Hux at all. He hadn’t liked him, and hadn’t bothered. But--why fake dedication to a cause? His actions, until then, had backed him up. Ren pulls back his finger, and then hisses in pain. The wire had dragged straight across his thumb and drawn blood in its wake. He turns back to the droid.

Ren’s still not finished by the time the sun is setting (and in the twilight, the planetary rings are more pronounced and more beautiful here than they ever get in the port). 

“Come in,” says Hux, sighing as if he’s terribly put out.

His hand is still close to his blaster.

The farmhouse is small, but well-equipped with a decently-sized kitchen separate from the main room, a fresher, and a closed doorway to what Ren assumes is Hux’s bedroom. Hux gives him a look that tells him not to snoop.

Hux sets the table for both of them, and Ren really doesn’t know what to do. He’s never cooked a real meal, but Hux apparently knows his way around this kitchen. It’s odd to see him so domestic, holding his hands so close to the flame on the stove as he heats up a pot of stew and a kettle of hot water. It’s terribly old-fashioned, and not at all like the mass-produced space military setting that’s the only place in which Ren’s ever really seen Hux (or perhaps the most out of place thing is how comfortable Hux is, how Ren wouldn’t be able to laugh at Hux out of his element if he’d wanted to). 

The stew is served with bread; it’s very good but Hux is almost daring Ren to tell him that, and Ren decides not to. 

And, since Hux doesn’t make Ren leave (though he does not provide any better bed than the floor of the main room), Ren stays the night. He’s a light sleeper; Hux won’t be able to kill him that easily.

* * *

Ren dreams of Starkiller, the bridge near the oscillator, the dust in the red light from the fading sun, and Han Solo walking toward him, measured steps and his eyes on Ren’s face. In the dream, he’s not wearing the mask and it’s not at his feet; it’s simply gone. His father seems more real than Skywalker had, but he’s still just an image in Ren’s brain, a memory come to life. (The more you recall them, people say, the more you forget and the more you make up, a memory of remembering a memory.)

“How can I make up for this?” Ren says. “Why am I here?”

(When he says it, he’s not sure if he means here-Starkiller or here-the farm.)

His father exhales. “Only you can answer that, kid.”

“But you’re me.”

His father flashes a crooked grin, ornery and obstinate even when it’s just a memory (and Ren can think of a million times he’d said things to make his mother mad, when he’d reached out to ruffle Ren’s hair when Ren had just arranged it perfectly, when the stakes were so much lower that it shouldn’t have counted and they all didn’t know how good they had it).

“How do you make up for what you did? Who are you making it up to?”

The galaxy, Ren wants to say, but this isn’t for them. “Myself.”

His father sighs. “Kid...you have to let it go. Maybe you can do something to even things out; maybe you’ve already done as much as you’re going to do. You can’t undo the hurt you’ve caused or bring back the lives you’ve taken, and you’re not the kind of person who’ll be satisfied just atoning for the rest of your life.”

“How do you know that?”

His father is unfazed by Ren’s biting tone. “I’m you; you said it yourself.”

Ren stares beyond his father, up at the balcony--no one is watching them this time.

“You don’t need my permission to do whatever you’re going to do. But nothing’s going to happen unless you forgive yourself.”

(He’d gone to the light without that; he’d thrown away his saber without that; at the time he’d been able to sweep his own thoughts of himself to the side and knock them out because there’d been no thoughts to spare for that. But here he has thoughts, and dreams, and time, and a person who reminds him of the hurt he’s caused. Can he forgive himself that, if he can forgive himself the rest?)

* * *

Ren wakes up the next morning, and the next, and again until he’s almost used to it. There is always a droid to repair or monitor, a processing machine to watch, a load to send out to the bottling plant or the refinery or the food processors. Hux’s droids and machines are actually quite efficient with the crops--Ren had thought that the harvest would be the busiest time, but it’s mostly assuring the autonomous manual labor is running as it should.

Presumably Hux had been doing that part before, but now he leafs through mechanical drawings on an old datapad that looks like it’s from the Rebellion. Ren won’t bring that up, nothing like inviting Hux to call his parents Rebel scum again--but would he? Hux hasn’t changed that much, and he’s certainly no Rebellion sympathizer despite having spied for the Resistance. Hux being happy to work on a farm doesn’t change his political alliances, and it’s not totally unbelievable.

Then again, Hux hasn’t discussed paying him, but he’s giving Ren free food and lodging, which isn’t nothing. But it does make this whole arrangement stranger. Hux doesn’t appear to be on any sort of power trip that he finally has Ren working for him. He looks at him like he wants to kill him, and Ren can feel his anger rising in the Force like a geyser, but it peters out before it can explode. Why is Hux letting him stay? Why had he even let him in? Wouldn’t he have tried to kill him already? He’s patient (lucky he’s not Force-sensitive), cowardly, and sneaky, but even he’s not that patient, and there’s no point in drawing this out. He hadn’t seemed like he was expecting Ren, so perhaps he’s still devising a plan, but no one knows Ren is here. This isn’t a star destroyer crawling with soldiers and officers scheming for the upper hand, filled with cameras Hux has little access to. 

Perhaps he wants something from Ren? The Force couldn’t have sent him here looking for the same thing, but he might know what it is Ren is looking for, and he might need the Force to get it. And he looks and acts, occasionally, like there’s something he wants to ask Ren but he can’t bring himself to say it. He’s always hated asking for help, but he’s always been able to frame it as glorifying himself. 

Ren can wait him out. He wants to know, but there is so much else he wants to know, and he’s got no idea how to ask, either. This is Hux, but this is not a situation he knows how to navigate, and it requires more than he can just rip down with his fists. If the Dark Side had brought him here, that’s what he’d be doing, but it hadn’t--but what could Hux want that’s not from the Dark?

* * *

“What happened with Palpatine?”

The question spills from Hux’s lips, tightly controlled, like hot water into a cup. He is turned away from Ren, fussing over the teapot on the stove and then digging through the cabinet as if they have multiple kinds of tea.

That’s the question he’s been wanting to ask the whole time, isn’t it?

“All of it,” Hux clarifies.

“I found the Sith wayfinder, and I went to Exogol. I met him there. He said he’d been the one to turn me to the Dark Side, that he created Snoke and the First Order, and that he wanted me to kill Rey. I thought I could turn her to the Dark Side and that we would overthrow him. She turned me back to the Light instead, and then destroyed him.”

That’s not all of it, but probably all Hux wants to know--all he needs to know. It’s all he can take, maybe; he shudders visibly, still facing away and for the smallest moment Ren wants to reach out and touch him.

The moment passes.

“It was all him. The First Order was all him, and he was always going to take over?”

“Yes,” says Ren.

It’s as if whatever was holding Hux’s Force presence together, bursting at the cracks, is overcome, but nothing comes flooding out. There is no wave of emotion, only empty despair and resignation. Hux turns around. He is not crying, but it might be better if he were. The expression on his face is trying to be neutral, but it’s too warped, too empty, like something has sucked out his essence. 

“I knew--I thought. And people have been saying that since the war ended, but I’d hoped it wasn’t him.”

Oh. Of course this was all about Hux this whole time, his internal reputation, his accomplishments. 

“It didn’t matter, did it?” Hux’s voice cracks on the last word, and that doesn’t seem to register with him.

He retreats into his bedroom without pouring himself tea or eating dinner. The kettle whistles, and Ren pours himself some hot water.

* * *

Hux doesn’t want to kill him anymore, and he doesn’t want to ask any more questions. Ren should just leave; Hux doesn’t have what he’d wanted. Where will he go, though? And what of the things he still wonders about Hux, the pieces of the puzzle that haven’t fallen into place? Hux has gotten free labor and free answers; Ren ought to get something, too.

“Why don’t you want to kill me anymore?”

Hux frowns over his cup of tea. “What would be the point? The purpose?”

“You get rid of me?” says Ren. “I thought you hated me.”

“Yes, I did,” Hux practically spits. “But that was pointless, too. I saw you as competition for my career. But that didn’t matter, even before I threw it all away to attempt to eliminate you--which didn’t even work. What would I get if I killed you, momentary satisfaction and a body to hide?”

“That’s not enough for you?” 

(Ren knows he’s baiting, but Force, Hux can still take the fucking bait.)

“No,” says Hux (his Force presence is flaring to life again, gassed up on hot air). “Killing you brings me no closer to getting what I want. And it never would have. If I had shot you dead on the  _ Supremacy _ while you were unconscious and declared myself Supreme Leader, what then? Would I have snuffed out the Resistance? If I had, would that power have been worth anything? Palpatine would have come back and taken it from me, and probably killed me for killing you. Or he would have made me his puppet. What was the point of any of it?”

Ren doesn’t have an answer for him. It’s not something he’d thought of, really--yes, Palpatine had wanted the First Order to acquiesce to him, but Ren had planned on double-crossing him and taking over. 

“Why is it pointless when you could have killed Palpatine?”

Hux is--he’s fucking flattered; Ren can barely believe it.

“It would take careful planning, set me back decades. And when he can just clone himself or whatever he did?”

“Is that why you switched sides?”

Hux shrugs. “I don’t know. I was afraid. I thought it was my best chance at getting rid of you and Palpatine, and if I were to escape to rebuild the First Order after they won, they wouldn’t try too hard to go after me since I’d helped them out.”

“That’s the most ill-thought-out plan I’ve ever heard.”

Hux shrugs again. He doesn’t disagree. 

“So how does all of this fit in?” Ren gestures toward the window.

“This was as far as I could go with the fuel I had. Farming was my only option. I hate it.”

That much is a lie. Hux likes it much more than he’ll let on. 

“Why are you here?” says Hux.

“Why does it matter?”

“Why do your questions matter?” says Hux. “I’m curious. You’re clearly not here to kill me, though you said you’d joined the Light Side. Doesn’t that mean you’re supposed to be spreading the Jedi gospel or something?”

“I did, but then I died.”

Hux nearly drops his teacup. “I’m sorry?”

“I died. On Exogol. Rey died destroying Palpatine, and I brought her back to life using the Force. But the effort killed me.”

“You’re not--a spirit.”

“I came back,” says Ren. “And then I came here.”

“Why not go find the girl, then? Or your family?”

“My family’s all gone,” says Ren. “My bond with Rey is broken. I don’t know where to find anyone, and a lot of the galaxy probably wants me to stay dead.”

“So you came here.”

“The Force told me to come here. There’s a reason; I just don’t know it.”

Hux looks skeptical. “So after you complete whatever it is you’re here for—”

“I don’t know,” Ren says. “I’m not a Jedi. I’m not even sure I’m still on the Light Side; I don’t know how to do that. I don’t know what I’m doing here.”

It’s more than he’d meant to say, but Hux doesn’t make a cutting remark. He’s just looking at Ren thoughtfully, but Ren can’t read what the thoughts are.

* * *

In this dream, they are on the training grounds that Ren had razed. He can touch the grass with his hand and feel it prickle and burn; he can smell the fire and taste it in the back of his throat. The day is clear and the air is clean when he looks up, though; he can’t maintain the illusion within the dream, not as Skywalker watches. 

“How do I stay on the Light Side?”

“It’s not something you can force, if you’ll pardon the expression,” says Skywalker.

“But why don’t I feel pulled toward it when I want to be there?”

“You’re close enough,” says Skywalker. “There’s a lot of darkness in you, and you might never get rid of it.”

“Dad said I had to forgive myself.” (Well, okay, it was really Ren’s mental version of his father, but this is Ren’s mental version of Skywalker and he’s going to treat him as such.)

“He’s right,” says Skywalker. “But you can’t force that either. But the light lives in you, just as the dark does. You don’t have much of a chance to draw on the Force right now--you’re not learning; you’re not teaching; you’re not trying to wield it like a weapon. But if you were to meditate…”

He pauses, waiting for Ren to shift guilty on his feet like a ten-year-old.

“You might find yourself drawing on the Light Side more than the Dark.”

“That’s helpful,” says Ren.

“Look, Ben--Kylo, whatever you want to call yourself--you’re the one who has to decide what you’re going to do with what you’re given.”

“Kylo Ren is dead,” Ren says quickly, echoing his father’s voice.

“Kylo Ren is you,” says Skywalker. “So is Ben Solo. Changing your name doesn’t change who you are inside. Maybe it can help you get there, that’s all. Darth Vader was my father, Anakin Skywalker; they were the same person, the good and the bad. The same man who chose to join the Dark Side, murder my mother, and cut off my hand chose to join the Light.”

“What about Hux?”

“What about him?” says Skywalker. 

“Is he why I’m here?”

Skywalker smiles, like he knows something so obvious that Ren really ought to know. “You tell me. You decided to come here.”

“The Force chose my destination.”

“You chose your destination. You reached out; you used the Force and found where to find what you were looking for.”

“I was looking for him?”

“If you say so.”

Ren wants to scream. This doesn’t make any sense; he hadn’t thought about Hux at all when he’d reached out. He’d asked the Force to tell him where to go, not to tell him where Hux’s farm was so he could go there and watch over droids and confirm Hux’s existential nightmares.

“He’s not on the Light Side. He’s done things as bad as I’ve done.”

“What are you going to do, turn him in?” says Skywalker. “You? You’re a wanted criminal, too.”

Ren falls silent. He doesn’t want to do that. He thinks of Starkiller and the Hosnian System, the screams reverberating inside his helmet, Hux ordering the military to test their weapons on a man who’d just learned of the things he and the galaxy had lost. He doesn’t want Hux dead. It’s not that it would do nothing, avenge nothing; that’s part of it, but--he hadn’t gone to Hux to kill him. He’d wanted to see him; some part of him hadn’t cared if it didn’t lead to a clue or whatever the hell he’d thought this mission was.

“You’re going to have to live with yourself,” says Skywalker. “But you knew that.”

He’s already had to; he already couldn’t. He sees Han Solo’s face falling away less now; he thinks less of the villages of people he’d slaughtered and whose terror he’d fed on.

“And you have to be willing to live with him, if that’s what you want.”

* * *

If they were still on the  _ Finalizer _ , Ren probably wouldn’t be able to resist the temptation of destroying a room full of redundant consoles, slicing through the glass with his lightsaber and smelling the burning plastic and metal through his helmet. He is not that person anymore, but that person is part of him. He can’t deny that or hide it from himself, but what does that mean? He sips at his morning tea and stares at the kitchen window behind Hux’s shoulder and the grey sky outside. Hux had said the frost should be coming soon, but it doesn’t feel much colder here. It’s nothing like Starkiller.

If he’s still Kylo Ren, is this the bed he’s made and must lay in, a life subservient to Hux? Does he deserve no one better?

That’s not what the Skywalker in his head had meant. It’s not the way he’d framed the discussion; that had been about Ren’s wants. Ren is here because he’d wanted to come here, not because he’d deserved no better, or because he’d thought of this as a punishment. It’s not a punishment, really; the fields are open and the planet is full of life, from mosses and crops to wild animals and livestock to the sentient people who work the land and run the businesses. Ren never would have consciously chosen this, but it’s not about the farmland or even the planet himself.

This place is nothing like the  _ Finalizer  _ or Starkiller superficially, but he wants it to be like them, deeply. Those had been the places where he and Hux had cut their teeth as officers of the First Order, co-commanders of a star destroyer and trusted as much as Snoke would ever trust anyone. Ren had been fighting his temper and the Light Side and how slowly he’d seemed to advance, how he was moving at the same rate as Hux was. And they’d hated each other, as much as they’d sought each other out, as much as they’d relied on each other to get things done, to show up like they were two moons orbiting the same planet at different rates, eclipsing each other every once in a while only to slip away again. 

Ren had thought of that, however briefly, when he’d reached out in the Force, not about killing Han Solo or fighting the lightsaber that had been his by birthright, but about the Durasteel panels and recycled space air, the sound of his boots in the snow and Hux being forced to stand out in the frosty air, competing for Snoke’s favor--how pointless it had been, in the grand scheme of things maybe, but how important it had felt, and that had been home, in the darkness.

They’d had places there, not carved out by destiny or by someone else shoving them into different spots, but places they had made more or less themselves. It had been more reliable and comfortable than anywhere Ren had ever lived. Ren’s place was his own, nothing like being with his parents, nothing like being with a nanny droid, or with Skywalker at the Jedi academy. He and Hux had both thrived on the consistency of their arguments, of the order of military life, the crisp uniformity of the viewports on the bridge and the same number of steps between any two doors. 

Hux has carved out his own order here, and though Ren would never know how to build it himself, he can appreciate it.

Hux feels no remorse for the Hosnian system, but Ren can’t hate him for it.

“Hux,” says Ren.

Hux looks up from his datapad.

“I’m here because I was looking for you.”

Hux’s face doesn’t change, but he’s a tangle of confusion in the Force.

“I miss it.”

He doesn’t bother to explain, and Hux’s confusion soon subsides like ripples in a puddle. He nods. Of course Hux misses the importance he’d thought he’d had, but he misses the same things that Ren misses. And maybe that’s why he hadn’t shot him in the first place, and not questions whose answers he’d already known.

* * *

Ren dreams of an open meadow and blue skies, mountains in the distance, like the establishing shot in a holodrama they couldn’t afford for the full scenes. His mother is there, and she looks the way he remembers from the last handful of times he’d seen her, but better. Her face is wrinkled and she looks tired but not quite so drawn and stressed, and maybe that’s how he knows it’s really her and not some projection in his head. He has never seen someone appear from the Force; even when he was dead he could never figure out how to commune with anyone else. 

“Mom.” he says--he can’t say anything else; he’s about to cry and he doesn’t know what he can say to make up for any of this, even if she forgives him.

She pulls him into a hug. She is a spirit, but she is still stronger than him, crushing him in her arms. He slumps over, still not small enough to lean on her fully, but she gets it.

“Mom, when you reached out--I saw your destiny. And I followed it.”

“I know.”

“I had to.”

“No you didn’t.”

Ren blinks. “But if it’s what you saw--and it came true—”

“Because you made it come true. The future is always in motion. Visions don’t always come to pass.”

“But because I did what I did, it happened. Rey destroyed Palpatine.”

“Yes, because the two of you did what you did. It’s not because of me or because of destiny. That was all you. I gave you what you needed, but it was your choice to use it.”

Ren’s not sure how to respond to that. 

“Ben, I...it’s hard to forgive you. That’s a part of Jedi training that I was never very good at.”

Yeah, Ren can’t really say that it’s unfair. Even without Hux around to remind him, he’d done and condoned and let happen so many terrible things. And he’d missed a time when darkness was central and essential, when he’d divided his time between a ship and a weaponized planet built on the backs of kidnapped, brainwashed slaves. 

“I can be angry with you and still love you, though,” she says (just like she had when he was young and had wrecked a state dinner, drawn with crayon on the walls of a rented apartment, thrown a tantrum on the street). “Nothing can change that. Even this.”

“You accepted his help,” says Ren. 

His mother laughs. “That was a little different. You love him.”

Ren’s face heats up. He would not put that in terms this blunt, not when they haven’t even talked about it, when some part of Hux probably still wants to kill him.

“Don’t fuck it up,” says his mother, but she smiles before the dream vanishes.

* * *

Hux kisses Ren first, out by the irrigator. His lips are chapped and his blaster is digging into Ren’s thigh, and Ren can’t think of what to do with his hands. 

“I wasn’t going to wait around for you,” Hux says. 

(He’d waited long enough; they’re both in agreement there.)

“Though you really could have done something,” Hux murmurs under his breath, purposefully just loud enough for Ren to hear.

Ren has a new way to shut Hux up when he’s being obnoxious.

For a brief moment, Ren thinks they could have had this all so much earlier. But they couldn’t; they wouldn’t have put aside their rivalry before Palpatine, before they’d both thrown the First Order aside. Hux wouldn’t have missed him enough to let him in before he had. If Ren hadn’t died, he would have left all of this too far behind to let himself miss it. There is no destiny involved here, but luck and the Force have allowed this, and sometimes that’s enough for them to make something out of it.

**Author's Note:**

> Lah’mu is the planet Galen and Lyra Erso lived on in Rogue One. The title is a reference to that and not much more.
> 
> This was such a mess to write so I hope it was readable lol (and really I am just projecting my meta desires onto Kylo idc how little they deserve it i want them to live forever like tfa)
> 
> Feedback is appreciated, particularly wrt how easy it was to buy the premise or how in-character you thought this was. Thanks so much for reading!


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